'''Well Suited for:''' a single-card solution for input/ouput of video and audio to a standard television, running only MythTV and recordings. Also well-suited for underpowered systems, since the onboard mpeg encoding ''and'' decoding mean your CPU has very little to do. As a single data point, consider that the utilization on 750 Mhz PIII is only 20% while watching live tv.

'''Well Suited for:''' a single-card solution for input/ouput of video and audio to a standard television, running only MythTV and recordings. Also well-suited for underpowered systems, since the onboard mpeg encoding ''and'' decoding mean your CPU has very little to do. As a single data point, consider that the utilization on 750 Mhz PIII is only 20% while watching live tv.

Technically X and xv output are working, but they are slow since they operate over the framebuffer.

mythdvd works if set up correctly, but takes a lot of CPU

Doesn't

Normal X output at decent speed/quality.

OpenGL and hardware accelerated output is not supported.

High-Definition (HD) output

No audio output from anything but MPEG2 - requires pass-through cable to line-in on sound card for other audio output

Well Suited for: a single-card solution for input/ouput of video and audio to a standard television, running only MythTV and recordings. Also well-suited for underpowered systems, since the onboard mpeg encoding and decoding mean your CPU has very little to do. As a single data point, consider that the utilization on 750 Mhz PIII is only 20% while watching live tv.

Not Suited for: MythVideo, MythMusic, MythGame, other output modes, recordings other than MPEG2

Associated Software

Installation guides

FAQs

Best info most likely found on the IVTV driver forum on Sourceforge.
See also the wiki at: http://ivtvdriver.org/

How do you send TV-Out audio to the sound card?

Take the L/R audio out and feed it into a L/R female RCA to 1/8 male adapter. Plug this into the line input of your sound card and make sure mute is off.

Displaying X on the PVR-350 video output

Q: How do you resize the MythTV UI and playback overlay to fit the TV screen when displaying X on the PVR-350 video output?

A:
This is one approach, based on a MythTV install created using Jarod's guide [1]. It does not currently resolve the more general problem of the whole X session fitting the TV screen. (See also A2 below)

Fire up kcontrol:

Go to Desktop->Panels->Hiding

Set "Hide Mode" to "Allow other windows to cover the panel"

In mythfrontend, go to Utilities/Setup -> Setup -> Appearance:

Go Next to the second screen, "Screen settings"

Check off the "Run the frontend in a window" box

Note: this step may not be necessary if you are using a different window manager, such as ratpoison. I found it necessary for KDE, so that step 2.1.9. would reposition the GUI properly.

Make sure "Use GUI size for TV playback is NOT checked

Restart the mythfrontend (if you are set up for autologin, Ctrl+Alt+Backspace will restart the X server and log you back into your mythtv frontend user+session)

Return to the screen in 2.1.1.

Play with the GUI width, height, X offset and Y offset until you can just barely see the lower resizing corners and edge of the upper window box.

(optional) Enlarge the width and height by one step (adds 8 to each count)

(optional) Decrease the X and Y offsets by 4 to re-centre.

The final settings for the NTSC TV used to write this walk-through were as follows:

GUI width (px): 616

GUI height (px): 456

GUI X offset: 46

GUI Y offset: 4

The final settings for the PAL TV 4/3 used to write this walk-through were as follows:

On the 8th screen, "Overscan", adjust the over/underscan percentages to your liking. This will resize the overlay when you're watching TV or playing back video.

Vertical over/underscan percentage: 8

Horizontal over/underscan percentage: 8

A2: This is another solution used to configure the port to operate. There are some test you should conduct first to make sure the card is talking to the TV correctly. If that checks out, proceed to follow that HOWTO. However, the section detailing fbdev will probably cause X-windows to crash, so don't follow that part of the HOWTO.

Add a boot script to execute:

#!/bin/sh
modprobe ivtv-fb

Adding this to /etc/modules may interrupt ivtv from properly loading firmware. So make sure this boot script executes AFTER ivtv has loaded.

NOTE: fbdev does NOT work!!! I found many sites a la Google that had all the correct X-windows settings, but they were about 2 years old, and they caused bad errors. The following settings should work pretty well:

Configure X-windows (Xorg or XFree86) to have a "device" for X to get displayed on.